• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 3, 2011

Last October, a Spanish appellate court ruled that sports site Rojadirecta didn't infringe on copyright by offering links that allowed users to find streams of sporting events.

That decision apparently didn't carry much weight with the U.S. authorities. This week, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement seized Rojadirecta's domain name, along with the URLs of nine other sites that allegedly infringe copyright by offering streams of sporting events.

As with a slew of domain name seizures that occurred over Thanksgiving weekend, the feds convinced a judge to order the seizures without first giving the sites a chance to tell their side of the story. That procedure in itself is raising eyebrows -- and rightly so. It's one thing to ask a judge for a warrant without notifying the other side in an emergency. But here, where at least one site has been around long enough to have fought a court battle -- and prevailed -- it's hard to imagine a justification for going to court without at least notifying the site first.

What's more -- as the Rojadirecta litigation demonstrates -- these sites might not even have infringed copyright. True, Rojadirecta was found legal under Spanish law. But the company could easily have a defense in the U.S. as well.

Sooner or later U.S. judges will probably press the federal authorities for more detailed answers about why they are seeking to shut down sites without first notifying them of the proceedings.

Meantime, the initiative has at least one key lawmaker asking questions. Earlier this week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton questioning the domain name seizures. "The new enforcement approach used by Operation in Our Sites is alarmingly unprecedented in the breadth of its potential reach," writes Wyden. "While I believe it important to combat copyright piracy, I grow concerned when the methods used may not be effective and could stifle constitutionally protected speech, job-creating innovation, and give license to foreign regimes to censor the Internet."